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SMASH! 2015 Impressions

It’s been already 3 months after the convention ended (sorry for the delay); time passes by quickly for sure! This was my first convention ever and it was amazing 🙂 I got my share of loots and saw many amazing cosplays!

I wanted to have a plan in front of me before booking a ticket, but it got out pretty late just 3-4 days before the online purchase closed down. SMASH! was a great experience and I don’t doubt there’s a lot of effort put into making this happen, but there’s big space for improvement.

Anyway, once I had the plan on my hands I could schedule what I would do during the weekend. In hindsight, perhaps just one day, the Saturday, would be enough to take whatever I needed from the convention, but I made new friends on Sunday and had the chance to chat up Khursten Santos from Otaku Champloo, so I don’t regret it.

There was a range of things one could do, from tournaments to screenings to panels, but I focused on getting my hands on little treasures from my favourite artists and workshops. Unfortunately, the workshops I wanted to watch were set in a room without shutters and thus you couldn’t clearly see what was showed; in the end I just skipped them. Initially, I also planned on taking part in the karaoke contest, but the system they used scored you for how closely to the original music sheet you were and I wanted to sing “You are my love” a scale lower, so I gave it a second thought and decided against it.

As I said, my first priority was the artist circle. Once the doors opened, I stormed in to pass by the stalls that I knew would interest me the most and get the goodies before they possibly run out. Below you can see most of them -sorry for the bad quality of the picture! I first went to buy that cute boxfox and a flower-crowned dinosaur by Mamath and the Wolf’s Rain poster as well as the Princess Tutu bookmark by hawberries. Next stop was Amei’s stall to get my hands on nameless & the scientist comic. Then I bought the two posters in the back which unfortunately can’t be seen as a whole -they are Takeri and Howl’s Moving Castle fanart posters by cryptovolans . Afterwards it was kidchan’s and Mrstmagnolia’s turn to get me fawning over their exceptional art -you can see Alex in Wanderland mini poster, the Sailor Moon artbook and the Eruri artbook, product of their collaboration, Till Death Do us Apart, which was also the more than pleasant discovery of the day. After the urgent stuff were cleared out levels of achievement I took a stroll to discover more and I fetched that lovely art nouveau print by yeehun, the Mushishi bookmark and the Kiki’s Delivery Service opal card sticker.

I also drew a sketch on a wall covered with big pieces of papers, and participated in an art competition, just for the heck of it. Below you can take a look at some of the wall sketches. The outcome is colorful and very much fun. You can spot some mecha, Attack on Titan, Tokyo Ghoul and Naruto. My contribution is the Anthy-inspired girl on the top right.

Then I went to eat and photograph cosplayers, something I engaged more extensively the second day along with a Japanese language meetup.

You can enjoy more cosplayers from the SMASH con in these craftfully compiled videos, too.

Lastly, I had a great time at the AMV screenings. And because sharing=love, here are the ones I enjoyed the most and could spot online.